A number of systems and programs are offered on the market for the design, the engineering and the manufacturing of objects. CAD is an acronym for Computer-Aided Design, e.g. it relates to software solutions for designing an object. CAE is an acronym for Computer-Aided Engineering, e.g. it relates to software solutions for simulating the physical behavior of a future product. CAM is an acronym for Computer-Aided Manufacturing, e.g. it relates to software solutions for defining manufacturing processes and operations. In such computer-aided design systems, the graphical user interface plays an important role as regards the efficiency of the technique. These techniques may be embedded within Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems. PLM refers to a business strategy that helps companies to share product data, apply common processes, and leverage corporate knowledge for the development of products from conception to the end of their life, across the concept of extended enterprise.
The PLM solutions provided by Dassault Systemes (under the trademarks CATIA, ENOVIA and DELMIA) provide an Engineering Hub, which organizes product engineering knowledge, a Manufacturing Hub, which manages manufacturing engineering knowledge, and an Enterprise Hub which enables enterprise integrations and connections into both the Engineering and Manufacturing Hubs. All together the system delivers an open object model linking products, processes, resources to enable dynamic, knowledge-based product creation and decision support that drives optimized product definition, manufacturing preparation, production and service.
Some systems allow the creation of shapes from provided sample points, e.g. point measurement data. A survey can be found in Chang (2007), Surface Reconstruction from Points, UCSD CSE Technical Report CS2008-0922. The following documents provide such solutions: Hornung (2006), Robust reconstruction of watertight 3D models from non-uniformly sampled point clouds without normal information, Symposium on Geometry Processing; Calakli (2011), SSD: Smooth Signed Distance Surface Reconstruction, Computer Graphics Forum; and Kazhdan (2006), Poisson Surface Reconstruction, Symposium on Geometry Processing, Eurographics. The possibilities in the state of the art can be summarized as follows. The point cloud can be unoriented (no associated outward orientation information) but in that case, it must be relatively dense. Typically it has to contain tens of thousands of points even for the simplest of shapes. On the other hand, if the points are oriented in the input, that is there is a known orientation vector for each point indicative of the normal direction to the shape, then it can be relatively sparse. However, this implies the burden of defining such orientation vectors. Indeed, existing techniques generally do not propose a satisfying solution for reconstruction of closed, watertight shapes from very sparse point clouds without any associated orientation information.
Some other techniques exist for creating shapes from a plurality of curves, as discussed in European application No. 11306583.3 which provides one solution itself and lists other solutions, such as the ones described in Abbasinejad (2011), Surface Patches from Unorganized Space Curves, Symposium on Geometry Processing, Eurographics, or Morigi (2011), Reconstructing Surfaces from sketched 3D irregular curve networks, Eurographics Symposium on Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling. These approaches all have in common that they aim at producing a boundary representation (B-Rep), which is a representation of choice for high quality manufacturable objects (consumer goods, cars, aircraft). In order to create a B-Rep, such techniques assume that the curves in some way represent a network, and that a boundary can be built that exhibits roughly the topology of this network. This has a couple of important implications. Firstly there must be some means of inferring how the curves cross in 3D space. And then, once their crossings are known, loops and faces must be computed in order to infer the topology of the boundary. Regardless of whether the B-Rep is an open or closed shape, the above mentioned network constraints will still have to be satisfied for it to be usable, which implies a relative burden on the designer.
Within this context, there is still a need for an improved solution to design a 3D modeled object.